After joining IBM in 1963, Jim Cannavino spent more than 30 years at the company. By the early nineties, he was running Big Blue's personal systems division, overseeing the development of OS/2, the ill-fated operating system originally developed in partnership with Microsoft. Today he serves as chairman and CEO of Direct Insite, an application service provider based in Bohemia, New York.

Q: Why was it that when Microsoft and IBM parted ways, Windows took over the market and OS/2 became a historical footnote?

A: Both IBM and Microsoft did a pretty poor job developing OS/2. When I took over the development team, it was still a 16-bit system, and it looked very much like something that had a bunch of different developers in different places working on it. But IBM had a lot of major customers committed to using it. They were in desperate need of a multitasking operating environment, and we had to finish it.

Q: By version 3.0, hadn't you ironed out a lot of those problems?

A: Version 3 was a solid, award-winning operating environment. It served our customers well. But by that time, the software developers of the world had struggled through the 16-bit version, and they were financially drained. Windows started to take off, and there just weren't enough application-development dollars to keep apps on both platforms.

Q: What's your opinion of the current Windows platform?

A: It's a very successful piece of software, a very successful venture. But a mainframe boots up faster than a laptop, and that's kind of silly. Plus, the architecture really doesn't lend itself to high-level security. Basically, you've got smart guys plugging holes. Though they do a really good job of it, they can never tell when they're finished. If you restructured the architecture of the system and really put some boundaries up that were hard to get by, then there's no reason that your e-mail system should be able to corrupt your file system.

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